


Ask Me No Questions (And I'll Tell You No Lies)

by Goodforthesoul



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cinnamon Roll Jon Snow, Consent is Sexy, F/M, Healing, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jon and Sansa Are Not Related, Roommates, Trauma, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 20:46:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17066813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goodforthesoul/pseuds/Goodforthesoul
Summary: Of course, she goes to Jon. She shows up at the door of his apartment building, and he takes one look at her, the baggy sweatshirt, her tired eyes, red-rimmed from years of crying, her greasy hair, her hollow checks, and he doesn’t say anything, just opens the door wide enough for her duck through and he leads her up the stairs to his one-bedroom apartment. He hasn’t asked her any questions (she knew he wouldn’t, that’s why she goes to him) and she doesn’t offer him any answers.





	Ask Me No Questions (And I'll Tell You No Lies)

Of course, she goes to Jon. She shows up at the door of his apartment building, and he takes one look at her, the baggy sweatshirt, her tired eyes, red-rimmed from years of crying, her greasy hair, her hollow checks, and he doesn’t say anything, just opens the door wide enough for her duck through and he leads her up the stairs to his one-bedroom apartment. He hasn’t asked her any questions (she knew he wouldn’t, that’s why she goes to him) and she doesn’t offer him any answers. He shows her to the bathroom so that she can clean up, shower off the grime of travel (he doesn’t know that the filth that is on her is embedded so much deeper than her skin, that it will take more than soap and water to ever make her feel clean again). The rest of the night he watches her warily, as she, in another baggy sweatshirt (his this time) and sweatpants (also his), picks at the food he puts down in front of her (He gives her soup, which she sips, but doesn’t finished even half of, and a sandwich which she barely touches), not tasting anything, and then curls up in his bed and goes to sleep. (He doesn’t know that this is the first time she had truly slept in months.) He sleeps that night on the couch with his dog, Ghost, a big wolf-like thing that takes up half the cushions (and it feels more like standing guard than sleeping to him).

For close to a month, he lets her drift around his apartment like phantom. He doesn’t ask her about the bruises on her arms. He had glimpsed them one of the first nights she was there. She had a nightmare and her violent thrashing had woken him up and exposed her arms, the blue and green and yellow blotches against pale skin (he tries to comfort her but she shies away from his touch and he feels so helpless that the next night when she wakes up, crying, hyperventilating, he has Ghost hop on the bed, hoping that the dog might give her the reassurance that he doesn’t seem able to provide). He doesn’t ask her where she has come from (it doesn’t matter; there is no way she is going back) or what she plans to do next (that also doesn’t matter; she is here now and she is safe). He doesn’t ask her why she has come to him (he knows that answer well enough: she has nowhere else to go). 

He tries not to find her stillness unnerving. She sits in one spot for hours, staring at a chair, the wall, nothing at all. And he wonders what she sees in those moments, but he doesn’t ask. (He could guess that whatever it is, it isn’t good.) Sometimes when she is sitting like that, Ghost comes over and puts his head in her lap, one eye fixed on the spot where she is looking, and she runs her fingers absently through his fur. Some days he leaves for work at Amnesty International in the morning and when he gets back in the early evening, she does not appear to have moved. If it were not for the nightmares, he wouldn’t be sure she actually ever slept. 

After three and a half weeks, he decides to talk to her. He has given her as much silence and space as he can, and now he has to do more, do something, to help her heal. (He knows he should talked to her sooner, done something sooner, but he is a coward and he could never find the words to say or the strength to confront her. And he was so afraid of making things worse, that he didn’t do anything at all.) He sits in front of her and says her name as gently and softly as he can, but she doesn’t look at him. 

“Sansa, please,” he whispers, and his voice is so loud in her silence. “You don’t have to talk to me. But you need to talk to someone.” 

“I can’t,” her voice cracks. It is hollow and distant from lack of use and her eyes fill up with tears. “I’ve been so stupid, Jon.” 

“No,” he says firmly, and he is shocked by the force of his voice. “Whatever happened to you. It was not your fault.” He meets her eyes and the blue is dull and their lifelessness makes him afraid. “It’s not your fault, Sansa. Don’t blame yourself.” 

She begins to cry and collapses into his arms. He holds her and strokes her hair and murmurs over and over that it is not her fault and is just glad that, in this moment at least, she does not seem to be afraid of him and that she doesn’t flinch away from his touch. 

After that day, after she cries and he holds her, there is a thaw between them. She asks him how his day was and helps him make dinner. He notices that she is eating a bit more but never finishes the food that he piles onto her plate. (She is thin, too thin, boney and fragile and broken.) She offers him back his bed, but he tells her that he likes sleeping on the couch. (In truth, it’s uncomfortable as hell, and there is hardly enough room for him and Ghost, but he would never take the bed from her.) She thanks him for letting her stay with him, and he tells her that it is no problem, that she is family (he does not mention that they are almost all alone in the world, that they are all that they have left; he knows that otherwise she would have never come to him). She still doesn’t tell him what happened to her. 

One night, as they are sitting having dinner, she tells him that she’s sorry. They have spent most of their time living in a kind of fragile silence. It doesn’t bother him. Since Ygritte left, he’s gotten used to being alone, used to the quiet of his apartment. The whole time Sansa’s been here, he’s not felt the need to talk, to fill the emptiness of the space around them. So now, he is surprised to hear her speak. 

“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I’ve been such an ass to you.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “It seems like you have some…” he pauses, searching for the word that communicate what he means without saying too much, “stuff… to work out.” It is the best he can do. The closest he can come to the bruises and the sobbing and the nightmares.

She looks down, unable to meet his gaze. “No, I don’t mean now. Or at least, not just now. I also mean before. I was awful to you when we were children.”

“You weren’t awful,” he says. But he too looks down, because they both know it is a lie. A lie kindly meant, but still a lie, and not one that can erase the painful history between them. 

“I was awful,” she insists. “Gods, Jon. The way I treated you. Some of the things I said. I could be so haughty and cruel.” 

She had been all of those things at times: haughty and awful and cruel. There were times when she had made him feel small, unwanted, and unworthy. But she was not the only child to make him feel that way. The taunts of bastard had followed him throughout school and Catelyn, Sansa’s mother, had a penchant for making him feel like a burden on their already large family. 

Jon’s mother, Lyanna, had been Sansa’s father’s step-sister, although the two looked so alike that most people assumed that they shared blood. And they might as well have, Ned and Lyanna were so close. She had been very beautiful, everyone assured Jon, but her life had been short and tragic. She had been unwed when she had conceived Jon, and she refused to say who the father was, even when Ned had begged her to tell. During Jon’s delivery, Lyanna had suffered an eclamptic seizure, and the doctors had been able to save him, but not his mother. With her dying breaths, she had named him Jon Snow and had extracted a promise from Ned to care for her son. 

So, Ned had brought Jon home to Winterfell, and he and Catelyn, already heavily pregnant with Robb, cared for him. A month later Robb was born and the two crying, hungry babes had been too much for the young mother. The boys never slept at the same time, one was almost always wailing to be fed or changed or for no discernable reason at all. It was in that first year that Catelyn’s resentment of him was planted and throughout his childhood, he watched it flower and bear bitter fruit. 

“You were occasionally awful.” (Part of him secretly wishes that she still was. He would rather have her be haughty and awful and cruel than so beaten and broken.)

“And now you’ve been so good to me and I don’t deserve it.” 

“Of course, you deserve it. We were children. All children are awful and cruel. I’m sure I wasn’t much fun, sulking in the corner while the rest of you played.” He smiles, a bashful, self-depreciating smile. And she smiles back, and it is small and sad and the light of it does not quite reach her eyes. But it is the first time she has smiled since she showed up on his doorstep and he’ll take it.

“Can you forgive me, Jon?” 

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Forgive me.”

“Alright, I forgive you.” 

“Thank you,” she says softly. “Not just for that, but for everything.” 

They sit in silence for a few minutes. 

“I’m going to try to do better, Jon.”

“You’re doing fine.” 

She shakes her head. “No. I’m really not, but I’m going to try.”

“Take all the time you need. You always have a place here. With me.” And he realizes that he means it. That he has become used living with this ghost of the girl he once knew. 

Then she starts reading. His apartment is full of books and she devours them. He finds them, finished and discarded in the bed, the laundry basket, on the bathroom vanity, the coffee table, the kitchen counter. At night, while they eat their dinner, she sometimes fills the silence by talking to him about what she read. Some of the books he remembers, others he has forgotten completely. But it doesn’t matter. She is talking again (although not about whatever it is that hunts and haunts her a night; that remains an unacknowledged specter that he has no way to exorcise), and that’s something. 

She had always loved stories, after all. 

It’s not just the reading though, she is doing better. She’s eating more, most nights she has dinner cooking before he gets home from the office. At night, they sit together on the couch that has become his bed and watch TV, Ghost curled up between them. She seems to start to actually notice things about him. “I like your beard,” she comments over a kidney pie with peas and onions. “It suits you.” And one Saturday afternoon his contacts are bothering him, so he puts on his glasses, and she smiles and teases him, telling him that he looks like Harry Potter, and he grins in response. 

She still sobs at night though, still haunted by the nightmares she has lived. 

One night, Ghost refuses to move from the corner of the couch where he is sleeping, his head on the armrest, and Jon is forced into the middle seat. He doesn’t notice that she’s fallen asleep until he feels her head on his shoulder. He tries to pull away, but in her sleep, she grips his shirt and cuddles closer. He pulls a blanket over her and puts his arm around her and sits like that for an hour smelling the faint lemon of her hair. He doesn’t want to wake her. This is the most peaceful she’d been since she knocked on his door, but eventually, he does, and she apologizes for falling asleep, and he sends her bed. That night as he lies on the couch and tries to fall asleep he thinks of what might have been if everything had been different. 

She gets a part time job working a coffee shop. It is on the same block as his apartment, but some mornings, especially after a bad night, when she wakes up pale and drawn and haggard with purple bruises beneath her eyes, haunted by the darkness of her past, she asks him to drop her off on his way to work, even if there are hours before her shift begins. When she works closing shifts and is at the shop until after sunset, Jon walks with Ghost to pick her up, sipping an espresso or Americano while she finishes up cleaning the machines and sweeping the floor and on the way back to the apartment she jokes that she is “lucky to have two strong boys to walk her home.” 

Val, the pretty new project manager at Jon’s job, a woman, strikingly beautiful, with honey-colored hair and light blue eyes, asks if he would like to go out for coffee or a drink sometime. Jon says no, and for some reason, he thinks of lemons. 

When Sansa gets her first paycheck, she gives him half. “For rent and everything,” she tells him. He assures her that it is unnecessary, but she insists, and he gives in. With the other half, she buys two bottles of expensive champagne. She says that it is to celebrate her new job. He doesn’t have champagne flutes, but she laughs, a real laugh, and tells him that bubbles are bubbles as she fills a pint glass, and he would give anything to hear her laugh again. He watches her sip the champagne and for the first time she looks like the girl he knew, the Sansa he remembers from what feels like long ago. 

They drink too much that night. Everything is glowy and warm. And Jon can’t help but notice the way in which Sansa’s hair shines brighter than the dim lights of his apartment and how the pink flush of her cheeks brings life back into her face. Their are small, innocent touches between them, his hand on her arm, his head on her shoulder as they laugh, the brush of their arms, their knees bumping. It is careless and reckless and he cannot stop himself. Because the best part is that she doesn’t shy away. 

Later that night, though, he has cause to regret it. They have said their goodnights and he is settling into the couch, trying not to mind the way that the room is spinning around him when she comes to the bedroom doorway, dressed only in a t-shirt. His eyes travel up her long, creamy legs, and he feels guilty as sin but can’t stop himself. “You could come with me, you know,” she says. “To bed.”  
And though he aches to touch her, to kiss her, to love her, to make her quiver and moan and call his name, to fall asleep with her in his arms (and although he can feel himself harden at the thought of it, at the sight on her legs and the promise of her words), he shakes his head and gently tells her no. It’s too soon. It’s not a good idea. (It’s too dangerous, he wants to tell her. You’ve just begun to rebuild. And also he would feel like he was taking advantage. That he had gotten her drunk to get into her bed. That like half of her paycheck this would feel too much like she was paying him back and he couldn’t live with that.) Her face falls and through the thin wall that separates them, he hears her crying. He knows that he is not strong enough to go to that room, that bed, with her and so he sends Ghost to look after her and doesn’t fall asleep until the apartment is silent.  
The next morning, she is cool with him and he hopes that it is just because she has a headache from the champagne. His own head is pounding and he resolves that he won’t drink like that with her again. That what they have is too fragile and too important and that he can’t let it be shattered in a night of careless indulgence and selfish mistakes. 

He is unfocused at work and all he can think about is how to tell her how much he cares and why they need to build these walls. Why it is better and safer for both of them. But he can’t find the words. He is too afraid of hurting her and losing her forever. 

When he gets home, she is cooking pasta and meatballs. And after dinner she tells him to forget the dishes and she takes his hand in leads him to the couch. He sits beside her as she tells him everything. About Joffrey and Petyr and Ramsay. About the bruises and fractured bones and broken promises. About the way that Joffrey would insult her, slap her, that Petyr would wheedle and cajole and threaten, that Ramsay would force her legs apart and take what he said was his.

He holds her while she sobs and he strokes her hair and he tells her that she is safe now, that they can no longer hurt her, that he’ll protect her. And when she looks up at him, she touches the old, faded scar that runs from above his eye to his check (he had gotten it one day play-fighting with Robb, pretending to be knights, and though sticks couldn’t do the same damage as swords they did enough to send him to the emergency room). Her eyes are red and watery and she thanks him for not being like the other men in her life. He kisses her on her forehead and she tells him she should get to bed, but her fingers linger on his cheek and her eyes on his lips. 

Jon hadn’t realized how oppressive the not knowing had been until Sansa’s confession dispels it, a cool breeze that blows away the stuffy air of his apartment. He tries not to look at her with pity, because he knows that she will hate that. Instead he marvels at how strong she is, has had to be, to have endured all that. He realizes that he was wrong. She wasn’t broken when she came to him, she was just bending under the weight of all that she had been through. And now that she has told him, she is beginning to stand tall and straight and strong again. 

But despite the not-knowingness being blown away, the apartment seems smaller than it had been. Perhaps it is because Sansa is no longer withdrawn, small, curled in on herself, but they seem to be constantly bumping into each other. She reaches past him to get a cereal bowl and her breast grazes against his arm. He runs into her after getting a beer from the fridge and puts a hand on her hip to steady her. Their hands brush as he gives her a glass or she passes the sriracha. (And he doesn’t want to admit it, but he knows their fingers linger, their eyes meet, their hands touch for just a little too long. And there is a new sense of oppression to the apartment. Something roiling, boiling beneath the surface of their placid domestic life.)

He picks her up from work one day and glowers as a male coworker hugs her goodbye. The guy is good looking in the conventional way that Sansa always preferred: tall and athletic, blond hair, blues eyes, strong jaw, dimples. She tells him that it’s just Harry and that she has no interest in dating him, the other women that work at the shop have warned her that he tries to fuck every new barista, but Jon is gloomy and brooding and sullen the rest of the night and he knows that he is being stupid and dramatic and that she isn’t his and that he has no right to be upset over a little hug, but it doesn’t help. 

The next morning while they are both getting coffee (he takes his black; she like hers with milk and three spoons of sugar) she kisses him. Or he kisses her. It is hard to tell, but they are definitely kissing, his arms around her waist, her fingers in his curls, breathing each other in. And he still isn’t sure that he should be doing this, knows that she still vulnerable, but her hands gripping his hair and her moans against his mouth and the sweetness of her lips, and he is lost in her and he pulls her closer. He can feel himself growing hard and she presses against him, her breasts against his chest, her thigh against his cock. 

He manages to pull away, to untangle himself from her. “Do you truly want this, Sansa?” he says, keeping his voice gentle, though his eyes are dark with desire, with a fierce desire for her.

“I do, Jon,” say replies with a smile. And this time the light of it reaches her eyes. “For weeks now.” 

And then he is kissing her, soft and deep, and his beard is rough against her chin. “Take me to bed, Jon,” she whispers in his ear, leading him into the bedroom. 

The first time they make love it is painfully, deliciously slow. Jon asks her permission before taking off her shirt, removing her bra, unzipping her jeans, pulling down her panties. He is careful with her, and he finds that it turns him on to describe to her the things he’d like to do, touching her breasts, rubbing and sucking her nipples, stroking her sex, slipping fingers and tongue inside her cunt, and hearing her breathy moan of yes. When he is inside of her, slow and cautious at first, she meets his thrusts with her hips, forcing him deeper, and he asks her if she wants it harder, faster, and she cries out yes again and again and again as they both cum. 

“I didn’t think you wanted me,” she says. “I thought that after everything, you couldn’t.”

“Sansa,” he murmurs into her hair, his heart both full of her and breaking for her. “I have never wanted to be with a woman more. But I also wanted you to be happy and safe. I didn’t want to be, I was afraid of being, like the others.”

She turns to face him. “Jon, you are as far from Joffery and Petyr and Ramsay as anyone I’ve ever met. And I do feel happy and safe. When I’m with you. I think it’s the first time in a long time, since everything, dad, mom, Robb, that I have.” 

He pulls her closer to him. “I’ll always take care of you.”

“And I’ll take care of you. We’ll take care of each other.” 

“And Ghost. Who is probably desperate to go for a walk at this point.” 

They get dressed and go out, Ghost’s leash in Jon’s left hand, Sansa’s hand in his right. It begins to snow as they walk, the first of the year, fat flakes that catch on her eyelashes and in his beard. 

“You’re going to look like a true Northman,” she smiles. “With whiskers full of snow.” 

“Winter is here,” Jon says, echoing the old words of the North, words her father had often said. 

“At least we’ve found our pack.” 

And that night, they made love again, quick and passionate and desperate, before going to sleep, curled around one another in the bed that was once his, and then hers, and now theirs.


End file.
